Brooders

After much procrastination, I have embarked upon the task of cleaning up this blog after “Death by Comment Spam”.

Stay tuned … all should be backup and running soon.

Not really a redux, but a summary:

Udon and Artificial Machines
Udon and Machines, Part 2
The Age of Spritual Machines : Book Review (Udon and Machines 3)

All three parts, are listed above in the writing order.

The question from the book is the age old what is intelligence? Kurzweil’s spin .. How much computing power and software equals a human brain?

Let’s play with an idea, that Humans are just animals with complex language.

Yes, a Portmanteau word comprising:

Human + animal + ism = A belief that humans are just animals.

A quick search of wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanimalism reveals nothing found. Googling finds very few references to Gaia or gays .. not sure we want this term associated with that.

So why is this interesting or worthy of thought?

After reading Freakonomics, some scary truths seemed to emerge from that.

1) Intelligence seems to be largely genetic.

2) Environmental impacts (where you live, social interactions) are quite large on children and arguably adults.

So, Biology and environment seem to be important.

Certain news reports in Australia seem to indicate that we are fast becoming an obese nation. There’s a level of rationality which seems to lose to hunger, and in times of plenty (i.e. supermarkets) there is no season to regulate our intake of fatty foods, and there is no harsh winter to burn off our stored energy. Other animal behaviors like producing offspring, would seem like an instinct to propagate the species.

This may sound like the nature or nurture debate (Freakonomics may add Environment as well) but I do wonder if people are just a sack of chemicals programmed to survive, and in a post subsistence country this has unintended consequences. Perhaps, humanimalsim is related to hedonism. A definition from Wikipedia:

Hedonism is the philosophy that pleasure is of ultimate importance, the most important pursuit. The name derives from the Greek word for “delight” (ἡδονισμός hÄ“donismos from ἡδονή hÄ“donÄ“ “pleasure”, a cognate of English sweet + suffix ισμός ismos “ism”).

While I don’t have any hard statistics, some of the things I’ve read indicate that lifestyle related health issues (e.g. blood pressure, cholesterol, cancer from smoking, sexually transmitted diseases) are on the increase. So is this Hedonism or Humanimalism?

Anyway .. that’s a thought for today.